On Moving, Home Renovations and other Natural Disasters

Compared to the people who have been without a home over the past several months through floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados, it sounds rather trivial. I was only dealing with some renovations which involved moving my home office and waiting for the cable guy.

Still, to my 7 and 9 year old, not being able to connect to Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin was a big deal. As for me, I managed to get by, tethering to my iPhone and physically going into the office more than usual.

But it got me thinking about our reliance on the physical and what that means in the context of the cloud.

Following the floods up in Queensland, Australia, I heard a story about a cloud-based managed service provider. As the floodwaters receded, they hired a bunch of sales folks who went around to every small office and retailer in the region and told them to call before they spent their insurance money buying new computers. Why buy a bunch of servers to run MYOB or Quicken and risk floods, fire and theft, when you can run everything including your POS out of the cloud?

But when you don’t have an Internet connection, the cloud is of little use.

Of course, when you hit that exception, knowing exactly how your business will continue to run is crucial.

Clearly, there are trade-offs to be made. Without an Internet connection, I can’t access my cloud based applications and data, but neither can I send and receive email or verify credit card transactions. What do I need to be able to do even in an offline state, and what applications are useless to me unless I’m online?

What are the options for WAN redundancy? When I learned about the Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis, I knew my friend was safe was from his Facebook postings. While he didn’t have power, his phone still worked. For individuals, perhaps tethering is the right solution; for a small branch, 3G backhaul as a failover option in the router may be more cost effective.

Ultimately, the answer will be that there is no single answer. Not only is every business different, but each application and its use will be different. It’s only when you take stock of those applications that you understand where your own requirements lie.

I needed to stay connected to do my job while the renovation work was being done. But my kids… they read a book instead.

While there are many people already using this technology today, I agree that it will take some time for people to become truly comfortable with cloud based technologies—and for the cloud providers to earn people's trust. Encryption of the data will be a important component of that trust, and the real question then becomes who has access to the keys. As an example, consider cloud based backup service provider, Mozy. They provide two options for the encryption of your data, or rather two key management options—either you let them manage the keys or you manage them. In the first case you trust that they have proper controls in place to prevent random employees from sifting through your data. In the second case, it's your responsibility to remember the key. If you lose it, you can never recover your data since they don't retain a copy. But the choice is now in the hands of the user. And that makes the difference.

With the cloud, bandwidth is the main issue - What's the point of having an 35 Mbps high speed broadband connection with a download limit of 2 Gbps? Only the folks behind Internet Leased Lines with Unlimited browsing can take advantage of clouds.

Certainly there are a fair number of cloud services whose business models have been based around US-centric "all you can eat" bandwidth pricing. But I would suggest that to be more of a consumer issue. I have spoken with a few companies outside of the US leveraging Amazon EC2 in innovative ways. The cost of both the IaaS and bandwidth still makes more sense that building out their own compute capabilities. And even on the consumer side, SPs are beginning to offer different plans to support emerging business models around supplying or at least enabling music and video content.

Remodeling. What a pain and what disruption if you lose your connection. That said, it's interesting how Cisco and Canadian remodeling superstar Mike Holmes are collaborating.
http://bit.ly/c2035holmes

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